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Something very strange is going on. Iran is negotiating its surrender. The war is over and Iran has lost.. I have been assured that the United States has destroyed Iran's ability of their proxies to project power in the Middle East.
Yet somehow, despite this war goal being accomplished and the war being over, Saudi Arabia is still being attacked by Iran's Proxies..
At least 12 people were killed and over 300 injured in a Houthi missile attack on King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh on Saturday, October 10, 2026. This marks the third strike on the facility in one week and the deadliest attack in a Gulf Arab country since the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran began in February.
In response, President Donald Trump stated the U.S. is considering joining Saudi Arabia’s military campaign against the Houthis, while the U.S. Embassy issued a security alert urging American citizens to avoid the Riyadh airport.
So to summarize, it looks like the war is expanding, Iran's proxies continue to be able to strike US allies, and Iran's proxies are escalating the conflict instead of backing down.
With early voting opening up soon for many states, what are the chances Iran has an October surprise in store for Trump? Trump has stated that the U.S. will not resume military strikes on Iran before the November 3, 2026 (midterm election). The U.S. military is deploying roughly 9,000 to 10,000 additional troops to the Middle East, including the USS Theodore Roosevelt carrier strike group and the USS Makin Island amphibious readiness group, which departed San Diego on October 4–5, 2026. This surge brings the total U.S. military presence in the region to over 60,000 personnel and establishes three aircraft carrier strike groups in the theater for the first time since April 2026.
So Iran knows that Trump wants the Iran War to quiet down before the Midterms, but he is preparing to escalate once it is over. Why would they play along with this? I believe there is a good chance they will escalate and cause Trump and Republicans political embarrassment soon. But maybe this doesn't matter, because for some reason, the Houthis don't count. So I guess everything is going according to plan. So this all could just be nothing.
I'm genuinely confused about why the Iranians (apparently) care about the midterms. Didn't we just get through four years of the Democrats letting Israel do whatever it pleased? Congressional dems have already shown that they have no intention of doing anything that might put a stop to the war, and see it as someone they don't like taking a hit to do something they wanted done anyways.
The Russians, in contrast, seem to understand now that the political establishment is pretty thoroughly neoconservative regardless of the sentiments of the American people, which is why they're willing to take cash to do something that helps the political fortunes of an administration that hasn't been very friendly with them.
I do think that either country could achieve a lot by pointing out that Lindsay Graham openly mocked Trump to the press while selling him on this war, presenting him as gullible and dismissing the voices of his supporters. Reminding him that the neoconservatives he's taking hits for despite him might make him less inclined to do as they say.
You would want to punish whichever party started the war even if both parties were equally likely to have started the war; if you cause either party to lose then it will result in a “lesson” about instigating conflict even 50 or 100 years down the road. Unlike the Trump admin, I think the Iranian leaders actually care about the longterm good of their particular people / nation, so they consider how to secure benefits for their group long after they are individually gone, as opposed to falling into the nihilistic “we are all going to die anyway” boomer-death-spiral ideology (something I also hear from the boomers in my own life). But with that said, the Republicans have tied themselves at the neck to Israel, so Iran has a clear interest in making them lose for this reason alone apart from concerns about war continuation; there’s more than just the war per se, there’s “I don’t want America to give a bajillion bombs to Israel for free” which is the Republican plan.
My point is that the parties are equally beholden to Israel, which is very different from being equally likely to have started the war. If they were just both ideologically neoconservative, you could train them to be anti-war that way, but it's well established that they care more about pleasing Israel than they do about winning elections, so the midterms are a nonentity to them.
They would rather have their pro-Israel opposition in charge of Congress than enact a not-pro-Israel policy themselves.
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